improve the Python language as required by ESRI and its
thousands of users

As opposed to the mere dozens of existing Python users? ;)

I'm really curious about what improvements are required. Hopefully this would mean improvements to the standard library rather than big changes to the core language, though as Python is used as a scripting language for geo-processing chains they may be looking at coroutines, continuations, and closure.

At any rate, here's hoping that they hire somebody who really understands Python and open source. Like Hobu :)